Google Hires Famed Futurist Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil, the author and big thinker on artificial intelligence and other topics, announced Friday he’s been hired by Google to “work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing.”

He says he’ll officially be on board at the search giant Monday. A Google spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kurzweil is best known for his theories about “The Singularity,” or the point in the future when technology becomes so advanced that it starts outsmarting humans on its own. Some of the concepts are laid out in a somewhat wacky trailer for his 2010 film “The Singularity is Near,” which features Tony Robbins, Alan Dershowitz and Kurzweil himself.

The hiring of Kurzweil builds on existing ties between the author and Google. The Mountain View, Calif., company has partly funded Kurzweil’s Singularity University, an academic program launched a few years ago in Silicon Valley to prep students for a tech-heavy future and such concepts as nanotechnology and robotics.

Kurzweil described his new title at Google as Director of Engineering. In the blog post announcing his hiring, he wrote: “In 1999, I said that in about a decade we would see technologies such as self-driving cars and mobile phones that could answer your questions, and people criticized these predictions as unrealistic. Fast forward a decade–Google has demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions of their Android phones.”

He added, “I’m thrilled to be teaming up with Google to work on some of the hardest problems in computer science so we can turn the next decade’s ‘unrealistic’ visions into reality.”